The Chinese government is the worst major government on Earth today. It's still a totalitarian government and an aggressive, would-be empire. It's amazing to me at times how much we are willing to do to build up their economy, only to have them eventually become a dominant military and trade empire in Asia, and possibly one day Europe as well.
When I think of how China treats the Tibetans and Uhigurs, I just can't believe that we let companies like Microsoft and Google trade with them. The scary part about this competition to build up their services in China is that regardless of which company wins, the Chinese government wins because its private and state-owned corporations get a much larger economy to profit from. That in turn goes into building up the military, which btw they are now making steady progress toward having a blue water navy in the pacific.
It's actually quite interesting to watch the dynamic between many of the right wing media rising stars like Michelle Malkin and Ben Shapiro and the bloggers on the right. Shapiro for example has been writing whiny pieces about being called a chickenhawk because he is a 21 year old rich kid who advocates empire and yet would rather go to harvard law than into the army. Malkin got severely challenged by Vox Day to a debate over the accuracy of her military facts in her book on internment which she wrote a bunch of blog posts and articles for many news publications about. The one thing you see a lot of is that the people who get big in any type of media, and blogging is a type of media, are people who regurgitate news such as the "metabloggers" (Instapundit for example) and bloggers who pretty much whore themselves out to one of the popular groups like the Republicans.
The bigger the personality, the less they like actually engaging the public. That's why I don't read Powerline, even though I am firmly on the right. IMO any blog that doesn't allow for comments or trackbacks, and isn't as big as Instapundit and a metablog (which would make comments/trackbacks VERY expensive to despam) is a blog I won't read. No matter how good it may seem, I won't read the blog unless it's really something you'd never get from the MSM like Michael Yon's coverage of the War in Iraq.
Seriously people, go into a big book store like a B&N or a BAM and look at the political magazines. The biggest ones are the ones that more often reiterate talking points than ones that are cool and challenge people to think. Reason for example, arguably one of the best political publications in the USA, has a readership I think that doesn't even reach 60,000 nation-wide. Yet the National Review, a rag by comparison, probably has at least ten times that because of the support of the Republican faithful.
Here's a cold, hard truth. Most people don't like their ideas being challenged. Clinton supporters always wanted to believe it was about sex and not purjury. Bush supporters can't fathom the possibility that Bush lied about Iraq and has absolutely no interest in defending our sovereignty. Most people like their nice little pre-conceived notions and have very limited real interests. It gets even worse when you get into technical areas like geek blogging because the market is inherently smaller.
If you're going to do your own thing, be prepared to not have much support from the general public. That's all there is to it. It may not be that geek blogging is going into decline, it's probably just that geek blogging is being severely eclipsed by other parts of the blogging world which IS GREAT for online civil liberties. We want blogging to be part of most Americans lives because it gets them active online with free speech. The more people get used to using their rights, the more people will actually notice a loss when they're stripped of them. You can't miss something you never had or used.
I live in Harrisonburg, a college town in VA where $35,000 would actually be a pretty good starting salary for a programmer since the cost of living is $17,000 a year. I'd rather be paid $40-45,000 a year here starting out than $60,000 in Fairfax, VA which is a pretty large IT area in the US, because the money would go farther here.
Seriously, these companies are abysmally stupid. They can always hire an English-speaking CS or CIS student and start a new branch in bumblefuck USA for much less than going to India. The best part about it for the management is that it's all domestic and if they do it right, they can drive out that day and talk to the team in person.
Like many CS students here, I'd rather work in this town for $45,000 because it's close enough to bigger areas that it's not a struggle to get out on the weekend, but it's small enough to make an entry level salary really attractive. I can honestly say that I'd be very happy making that same salary around here for 4-5 years because barring VA's tax rate going through the roof (yeah, fuck you Gov. Warner!) it'd be easy to really save and invest A LOT out here on that kind of salary.
Outsource to bumblefuck USA, not Bangalore India. That should be our new anti-offshoring slogan:-D
Whispering every so often is one thing, but my girlfriend and I have had some bad experiences with going out to see a movie. We had a couple sit down next to us and the woman was some frumpy, dumpy middle age woman and she kept glaring at my girlfriend (who was just resting her head on my shoulder) and even coughed up and sprayed a bunch of spit on my girlfriend's leg. Then there are the cell phones, the kids that aren't forced to sit down and watch the movie or leave and things like that.
We really need the theatres to say to people, "look if it's an emergency, take the call, but otherwise if you take the call we'll throw you out." I leave my cell phone off anyway. The real problem is that so many Americans are just selfish bastards and don't bother to think about others. They don't care about others' rights because it's all about them, them and only them.
Do you know how you can tell that the federal government just wants more power to fuck with the commoners? Look at things like this, the USA PATRIOT Act and like the and tremble. The government talks about homeland security, but the borders are still open, we're still butt buddies with Saudia Arabia (mainly on the receiving end in more ways than one), the government pushes for things that mostly target the general public and the push is always for more and more power while *gasp* not doing anything consistently pro-security with it.
This is a good example of why I vote libertarian in every election. The government doesn't need to be able to track cell phones because it already has the powers it needs to control the influx of terrorists: deportation, border security and wire-tapping regular conversations. If our government cared less about not offending people and more about really using its basic powers first to fight major crime and terrorism, we wouldn't be wasting our time reading about this stuff.
There is no good reason why someone shouldn't be able to run an ad that says, "we're cheaper than Geico, click here to find out how much you'll save by switching FROM Geico." Society is better off when we take off these arbitrary restrictions that keep cut-throat competition to a minimum by not allowing competitors to easily target each other. If they were trying to pass themselves off as Geico, that's one thing, but trademarks should not be an issue otherwise.
This is why I hate lawyers. To anyone else, most cases would need last only a few hours. Then you have the lawyers who need to go through elaborate procedures, arguing technicalities, making mountains out of mole hills and all of that happy horse shit. What we need is a jury power called, "dismiss with extreme prejudice." If a company gets a few cases dismissed under those terms, then the court begins to charge a non-refundable fee everytime it has to review a case brought by a company or individual. Every honest victory then counts as a positive mark against those bad marks and when they're 1:1 the fee stops being charged.
Those big on law theory wring their hands about stuff like people taking it to the streets. Well here's a novel suggestion, if the company abuses the courts like this, gets censured and then takes matters into its own hands... the government should storm its offices with police in full ninja gear, slam the people responsible head first into the wall while hand-cuffing them and charge them with murder in the first degree then give them a firing squad if convicted. If the government backs up the censure at every step of the way, the courts may have a chance to start reverting back to respectable institutions that serve the public rather than the loudest plaintiffs.
If Google wants to survive in the long run, they will need to stop playing favorites based on political ideology. They give, IMO, too much lee way for their adsense and google news people to restrict access. One blogger I know of was rejected as a "racist" because she questioned whether Nelson Mandela really should be called a hero. The irony of it is that my blog is far more politically incorrect than hers and AdSense for some reason accepted me. I wrote a letter to Google about the behavior of their AdSense policies and News development team, but they did the customary Google response which was "we don't care."
The thing that Google needs to wake up and realize is that they have been caught doing genuinely evil things like letting Hamas use AdSense to promote their recruitment and training centers, and Yahoo has survived enough big companies attacking them to make them a longterm threat. The real war is between Google and Yahoo, not Google and MSN, and Yahoo understands clearly how being apolitical is necessary to really become a hub for finding and accessing data online.
Don't be surprised if in a few more years of broadband development, that Yahoo is able to position itself as an alternative to many cable TV providers. Expect them to start providing premium content alone or in conjunction with Apple. If that happens, Google is actually going to be screwed because the market for that sort of media is huge and the amount of money that Yahoo will have will dwarf Google. Sooner rather than later, Google's stock price will crash down to maybe $20-$30 a share unless they really do some death-defyingly radical things every so often over the next several years that the market likes. In fact, I'd wager that if Yahoo can get deep into providing on-demand TV services, that in five years they'll be able to buy Google in cash unless Google really does become the "Microsoft of search services."
Google does this, they censor right wing sites trying to buy or run ads and have even been caught allowing Hamas to do recruitment on their arabic language site. Google seems to be morphing more into an "evil" company than a good one.
They've got the Black Hat fiasco, this and getting caught actively helping the Chinese police and not giving a flying fuck about it. Is anyone else thinking that Cisco needs to actually do a little bit of institutional introspection and admit the obvious source of their woes: their own damn psychopathic behavior?
I think any website that actively exorts its readers to commit sectarian violence against everyone dissimilar to them and provides some sort of way of organizing groups for that purpose is a pretty good target of our security forces.
Of course now some multicultralists are going to try and say that mainline Christianity and Judaism are just as bad as Islam because of things that happened several hundred years ago and that were sponsored by secular governments. To such people, I challenge them to read this and say that Islamist websites are not a very dangerous threat to our societies.
The slipper slope here is not in shutting down Islamist websites, but in allowing Islamists to freely operate. Wahabis in particular will mass murder even Shiites and Sufis in particular. There is a state interest, even in the US, of eradicating Wahabi Islam because even (Church of) Satanism is a better religion in practice than Wahabi Islam for society.
I pretty much have nothing to do with Amazon anymore. You want to protest this sort of thing? Go buy some books from another online retailer. Before you do, check to see if your Visa can be registered with visaextras.com. Buying from B&N through visaextras.com gets you a 20 bonus points/dollar spent at B&N, and if you buy a typical load of college text books, you'll be able to get a free gift card for NOT shopping at Amazon:)
(I don't get anything out of advertising visaextras, I just want to give people an incentive to protest Amazon)
All it takes is a few dedicated free loaders to make it not worth it for most coffee shops. Starbucks, Panera, our local chain called the Daily Grind and others don't mind people coming in and sitting down for a few hours if they buy at least something modest there, but the people you have to worry about are the cheapskates that buy nothing and still mooch off the wifi.
I would have no problem paying $1-$2 for a few hours of access on top of buying an espresso drink, and I can't really say that our local Starbucks' (yeah we have only 1, inside a B&N store) policy of charging $4 for 2 hours of access is unreasonable. The service is good, AFAIK unrestricted and pretty fast. Panera's is free, but it is slow as hell around here and it's filtered to an unacceptable degree. I couldn't even post blog updates because apparently my blog got listed as a porn site by their filter vendor. I know their reasons, and don't fault them, but for-pay wifi IMO is the way to go.
I see free loaders at our Starbucks all the time because I see other college students going there to study and not buying anything. They go there just because they like the atmosphere, but guess what people? Starbucks needs to make money in order to provide you with that. The least you can do is drop them a few bucks here that there. Don't give me that poor college student routine either. Most of the college students out there can afford $3 for a drink here and there. My family is now probably no more than half, probably closer to 1/3 or 1/4 as rich as most of the families that send their kids to our college. I have to work during the summer and year to pay for my expenses and even I can afford to pay my way when I go to Starbucks. Sell off that new Chevy Suburban or BMW that mumsy and daddykins bought you, if that's what it takes.
It's the same problem with file sharing. Most of the people I knew that were into it hardcore were people from richer families where they had the income to buy the music and movies. Ironically, it's usually the working class students and middle rung middle class students like myself and some others I know that actually pay consistently for such things. In fact, the people with the largest bootleg IP collections I've seen at college, tend to drive very expensive cars and have great apartments that they couldn't possibly pay for on their own without a lot of assitance from their parents.
Pass a law that nullifies software and business method patents.
Microsoft is slowly losing around here
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IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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· Score: 2, Informative
My university, which is one of the largest in Virginia, has already prominently placed Firefox or Mozilla on virtually all of its lab machines. We also have a general user lab that runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4. More and more students are being conditioned to think "IE=bad for me" because if you live on campus or in an apt that uses the school network, then if you use an unpatched OS or browser, you can come back home if there's a major worm problem and find your access cut off until you upgrade. Firefox is the easiest way to get around that.
After seeing him point out that the government came to regard hackers as such a major threat, I couldn't help but think that our government brings on most of its own problems. The hiring and firing practices and I suppose the procurement processes are also completely fucked up and need to be modernized.
Our government will put people getting $50-$60K into a jet that costs $2B to build and that can carry very large nuclear payloads. They nearly crippled our navy's ability to wage war on other naval power through the SmartShip program, all because they wanted to save on the cost of a sysadmin's salary.
I'm a libertarian by persuasion and I want the government buying the very best and being competitive in its core competencies. I want them to hire the best and brightest, and pay them accordingly because it's cheaper to pay someone an above fair market wage to get the best talent than to have someone do billions of damage to your country's networks. Saving money should be secondary to the government getting everything it needs to carry out its core missions.
Someone who brings a tremendous wealth of networking experience should be elligible for a six digit salary starting out, just as they would in the private sector. I have no problem paying someone who's extremely good at computer security several hundred thousand dollars to do federal network security because as I said, it's cheaper to pay for good people who'll get the job done right.
We also need fewer regulations that protect job security. People who don't do jack shit for the public should be kicked to the curb even faster than they would in the private sector.
they would actually treat their customers like their legitimate users unless they give them reason to believe otherwise. Here would be a good idea for Microsoft: allow unlimited product activations if you buy a site license for your house and send them a registration notice in the mail. Then product activation is against others who might steal your serial number.
I have enough PCs that I'd pay $300 for a "home site license." Microsoft could create such a thing without any hassle because for many households, it'd be worth it. All they'd have to do is make you send a copy of your driver's license or something in the mail and then if someone tries using your serial number that doesn't share the data on your driver's license, they go after them for infringement. That way, product activation doesn't harass law-abiding users.
I'd love to use Longhorn because it looks like a good release, but damned if I'm going to buy it and get 2 "harassment-free" installs. If I buy it, you can bet that I'll only buy it after I've either gotten a cracked CD or found a site license serial that actually works like the ones that XP uses. Every windows license I have is valid, though I use cracked CDs just to get around the PA. Seesh, why am I forced to behave like a common criminal? I can't wait to be able to switch back to OS X at this rate...
IE has some advantages for businesses that have already standardized on using Windows, but for companies that aren't diehard supporters, why bother? The "debugger in IE," if you can even call it a debugger at all, is horrible as is the browser in general these days.
Any sane company that doesn't need the IE-specific features would be insane to not build on Mozilla with its excellent debugging tools and then test with standards-compliant browsers like Opera and then test with IE. IMO, build on IE first instead of using Firefox or Mozilla is akin to using Notepad and nAnt for Windows.NET development when you have free access to Visual Studio.
When done right, sports and martial arts hone the violent instincts in young men and women to be disciplined and under control. Aggressiveness is actually a good thing when it is controlled by other impulses. Afterall, how many women out there would feel safe with a man whose first reaction is to just "talk it over" when he sees another man really accosting his girlfriend or wife?
I completely support the right of Rockstar to produce games like GTA, but I believe that ones like GTA are not cathartic. I despise the PTC even more than most here because of their rhetoric which clashes with a Biblical notion of parental responsibility, but I have to grudgingly agree that GTA is not good for many younger players. It's not like Quake or Unreal Tournament where you're shooting really fake-looking people to death, but you're graphically beating to death a guy who's similar to the hobo you might encounter walking down town. Most violent games are safe and cathartic because either the violence is for a "noble cause" or it's just mindless mayhem. GTA is very violent, very straight to the point about targetting certain groups, kinda realistically actually, that do exist in society and that many people might encounter on a daily basis.
As always, the real people to blame are the distributors like Wal-Mart. Rockstar deserves its FTC investigation for fraud, but let's not forget the fact that it was Wal-Mart, Target, etc. that put those copies of GTA in junior's hand in the first place. Rockstar, as bad as they may be, can't enforce that because they're just the company the makes the game.
I've said for a while that what we need is a return in this country to a real gun culture. We need the average kid to grow up in a Swiss-style family where the parents train them how to use it, and instill respect for weapons from an early age. We used to have that here and the violent crime rate was lower because since they were small kids, the general public knew what weapons were and understood the need for discipline. Most violent tendencies can be controlled through discipline. What we have to do is instill good training, respect and rational thought into our kids from an early age. If we did that, then crimes would be rarer, our jocks would be less likely to be anti-social assholes and society in general would be healthier.
I said that if you walked in like you had a right to be there and were caught rifling through their possessions. Meaning they find you just walking around, opening the refrigerator, drinking the milk (analogous to copying peoples' files) and snooping through their stuff. Most people wouldn't consider that an uninvited guest, regardless of countries. A hacker is not the type that says sorry and leaves immediately when they realize their mistake, but deliberately walks in like they had some right to be there.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. If you know you're not supposed to sneak around a company or agency's property, then why do you think it's ok to break into their computers? In most parts of the world, just walking into someone's house and looking around without the owner's permission would get you beaten or killed by the owner. It's common courtesy and most of these "hackers" seem to lack any of it.
As for the "horror" of his extradition, don't blame uncle sam. The British government is big enough to tell our government to piss off if it felt such a thing weren't warranted. The main reason that we don't do such a thing to our citizens is that most countries that would want our people sent over to them wouldn't give them a fair trial, and that's not inherently because they're American. A Chinese is probably no more like to get a fair trial in Mugabe's Zimbabwe than an American. Foreign governments know that if our people attack them, that our law enforcement will arrest them and prosecute them, even if the country is hostile. The feds threatened to arrest the Americans who defaced Chinese websites after the PLA-Air Force brough our AWAC down early in Bush's first term. Few governments, China's especially, would do that to their own people.
Every so often I get some dumbass at my university trying to get me to teach them those "mad skillz" of h@x0ring that apparently all CS majors have. My interest was always in programming, not in things like that. They even have the gall to look at me like I'm the asshole, when I tell them that I've never bothered to learn such things, that I feel that what they want to do is morally wrong and that they should learn to actually respect others' privacy and property. The same people would probably wonder what the hell is wrong with someone who asked them to teach them how to use a jimmy to open up some frat boy's car so they could screw around in his mustang. IMO, there's really no difference.
Does the internet really need an identity layer?
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The Seven Laws of Identity
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Given the fact that the TSA just got caught trying to continue TIA, I think that this is the last thing we need. It starts out very innocently. The industry adds something like this and pretty soon we have followup laws that begin to gradually force software to make full use of any sort of identity layer. Anonymity becomes nearly impossible, and for many countries that means that the Internet loses its alleged immunity to censorship.
One of the things that disturbs me about this sort of thing is that extreme rendition can work both ways. The Syrian government might want their back scratched for a change and Uncle Sam then turns over a few names held on US soil using USA PATRIOT Act powers to secret get the information. If our government is willing to ship people to get tortured, what makes anyone think that it's not immoral enough to scratch another, more abusive government's back a little by helping them clamp down on dissent?
Biometric information tied to your credit card would go a very long way toward solving many of these crimes. What we need are open standards for communicating and storing biometrics information. I should be able to look into a webcam with a retina scanner and it should be able to tell Amazon.com that I'm the person who owns the credit card being used. The problem with this system is that it'll end up making something like TIA more realistic because it'll be accompanied by laws that force software developers to make good use of it.
Is that most of the cost that goes into developing it is in the labor. The only problem that companies like Microsoft face is that their shareholders have gotten addicted to the high profit margins that have dominated for so long in the commodity software market. Realistically, Microsoft could afford to cut the cost of Windows from $100 per upgrade disk to $50 a copy and from $200 for the full version to $75-$100 if they wanted to become more aggressive. Office could see similar price reductions, and in fact such a major price reduction might be enough to cause a lot of buyers to just say what the hell and buy the software even if they don't REALLY need to upgrade.
If companies like Microsoft really want to rake in the cash on support and upgrades, they need to make them cheap and exploit economies of scale. It'd be a lot easier to convince many companies to buy a support contract that costs $5-10/machine/month for support and upgrades than make them pay $250 for an upgrade every two years. With that monthly fee, the company gets seemless upgrades and Microsoft gets a guaranteed revenue stream from them.
RSS is convenient for keeping track of news, but you'd think that these companies found a solution for Cold Fusion (nuclear physics, not the app server) with the way they tout it. Come on people, it's a XML stream that's updated with a little bit of programming/scripting magic, not something radical and new.
Slashdot Mirror
The Chinese government is the worst major government on Earth today. It's still a totalitarian government and an aggressive, would-be empire. It's amazing to me at times how much we are willing to do to build up their economy, only to have them eventually become a dominant military and trade empire in Asia, and possibly one day Europe as well.
When I think of how China treats the Tibetans and Uhigurs, I just can't believe that we let companies like Microsoft and Google trade with them. The scary part about this competition to build up their services in China is that regardless of which company wins, the Chinese government wins because its private and state-owned corporations get a much larger economy to profit from. That in turn goes into building up the military, which btw they are now making steady progress toward having a blue water navy in the pacific.
It's actually quite interesting to watch the dynamic between many of the right wing media rising stars like Michelle Malkin and Ben Shapiro and the bloggers on the right. Shapiro for example has been writing whiny pieces about being called a chickenhawk because he is a 21 year old rich kid who advocates empire and yet would rather go to harvard law than into the army. Malkin got severely challenged by Vox Day to a debate over the accuracy of her military facts in her book on internment which she wrote a bunch of blog posts and articles for many news publications about. The one thing you see a lot of is that the people who get big in any type of media, and blogging is a type of media, are people who regurgitate news such as the "metabloggers" (Instapundit for example) and bloggers who pretty much whore themselves out to one of the popular groups like the Republicans.
The bigger the personality, the less they like actually engaging the public. That's why I don't read Powerline, even though I am firmly on the right. IMO any blog that doesn't allow for comments or trackbacks, and isn't as big as Instapundit and a metablog (which would make comments/trackbacks VERY expensive to despam) is a blog I won't read. No matter how good it may seem, I won't read the blog unless it's really something you'd never get from the MSM like Michael Yon's coverage of the War in Iraq.
Seriously people, go into a big book store like a B&N or a BAM and look at the political magazines. The biggest ones are the ones that more often reiterate talking points than ones that are cool and challenge people to think. Reason for example, arguably one of the best political publications in the USA, has a readership I think that doesn't even reach 60,000 nation-wide. Yet the National Review, a rag by comparison, probably has at least ten times that because of the support of the Republican faithful.
Here's a cold, hard truth. Most people don't like their ideas being challenged. Clinton supporters always wanted to believe it was about sex and not purjury. Bush supporters can't fathom the possibility that Bush lied about Iraq and has absolutely no interest in defending our sovereignty. Most people like their nice little pre-conceived notions and have very limited real interests. It gets even worse when you get into technical areas like geek blogging because the market is inherently smaller.
If you're going to do your own thing, be prepared to not have much support from the general public. That's all there is to it. It may not be that geek blogging is going into decline, it's probably just that geek blogging is being severely eclipsed by other parts of the blogging world which IS GREAT for online civil liberties. We want blogging to be part of most Americans lives because it gets them active online with free speech. The more people get used to using their rights, the more people will actually notice a loss when they're stripped of them. You can't miss something you never had or used.
I live in Harrisonburg, a college town in VA where $35,000 would actually be a pretty good starting salary for a programmer since the cost of living is $17,000 a year. I'd rather be paid $40-45,000 a year here starting out than $60,000 in Fairfax, VA which is a pretty large IT area in the US, because the money would go farther here.
:-D
Seriously, these companies are abysmally stupid. They can always hire an English-speaking CS or CIS student and start a new branch in bumblefuck USA for much less than going to India. The best part about it for the management is that it's all domestic and if they do it right, they can drive out that day and talk to the team in person.
Like many CS students here, I'd rather work in this town for $45,000 because it's close enough to bigger areas that it's not a struggle to get out on the weekend, but it's small enough to make an entry level salary really attractive. I can honestly say that I'd be very happy making that same salary around here for 4-5 years because barring VA's tax rate going through the roof (yeah, fuck you Gov. Warner!) it'd be easy to really save and invest A LOT out here on that kind of salary.
Outsource to bumblefuck USA, not Bangalore India. That should be our new anti-offshoring slogan
Whispering every so often is one thing, but my girlfriend and I have had some bad experiences with going out to see a movie. We had a couple sit down next to us and the woman was some frumpy, dumpy middle age woman and she kept glaring at my girlfriend (who was just resting her head on my shoulder) and even coughed up and sprayed a bunch of spit on my girlfriend's leg. Then there are the cell phones, the kids that aren't forced to sit down and watch the movie or leave and things like that.
We really need the theatres to say to people, "look if it's an emergency, take the call, but otherwise if you take the call we'll throw you out." I leave my cell phone off anyway. The real problem is that so many Americans are just selfish bastards and don't bother to think about others. They don't care about others' rights because it's all about them, them and only them.
Do you know how you can tell that the federal government just wants more power to fuck with the commoners? Look at things like this, the USA PATRIOT Act and like the and tremble. The government talks about homeland security, but the borders are still open, we're still butt buddies with Saudia Arabia (mainly on the receiving end in more ways than one), the government pushes for things that mostly target the general public and the push is always for more and more power while *gasp* not doing anything consistently pro-security with it.
This is a good example of why I vote libertarian in every election. The government doesn't need to be able to track cell phones because it already has the powers it needs to control the influx of terrorists: deportation, border security and wire-tapping regular conversations. If our government cared less about not offending people and more about really using its basic powers first to fight major crime and terrorism, we wouldn't be wasting our time reading about this stuff.
There is no good reason why someone shouldn't be able to run an ad that says, "we're cheaper than Geico, click here to find out how much you'll save by switching FROM Geico." Society is better off when we take off these arbitrary restrictions that keep cut-throat competition to a minimum by not allowing competitors to easily target each other. If they were trying to pass themselves off as Geico, that's one thing, but trademarks should not be an issue otherwise.
This is why I hate lawyers. To anyone else, most cases would need last only a few hours. Then you have the lawyers who need to go through elaborate procedures, arguing technicalities, making mountains out of mole hills and all of that happy horse shit. What we need is a jury power called, "dismiss with extreme prejudice." If a company gets a few cases dismissed under those terms, then the court begins to charge a non-refundable fee everytime it has to review a case brought by a company or individual. Every honest victory then counts as a positive mark against those bad marks and when they're 1:1 the fee stops being charged.
Those big on law theory wring their hands about stuff like people taking it to the streets. Well here's a novel suggestion, if the company abuses the courts like this, gets censured and then takes matters into its own hands... the government should storm its offices with police in full ninja gear, slam the people responsible head first into the wall while hand-cuffing them and charge them with murder in the first degree then give them a firing squad if convicted. If the government backs up the censure at every step of the way, the courts may have a chance to start reverting back to respectable institutions that serve the public rather than the loudest plaintiffs.
If Google wants to survive in the long run, they will need to stop playing favorites based on political ideology. They give, IMO, too much lee way for their adsense and google news people to restrict access. One blogger I know of was rejected as a "racist" because she questioned whether Nelson Mandela really should be called a hero. The irony of it is that my blog is far more politically incorrect than hers and AdSense for some reason accepted me. I wrote a letter to Google about the behavior of their AdSense policies and News development team, but they did the customary Google response which was "we don't care."
The thing that Google needs to wake up and realize is that they have been caught doing genuinely evil things like letting Hamas use AdSense to promote their recruitment and training centers, and Yahoo has survived enough big companies attacking them to make them a longterm threat. The real war is between Google and Yahoo, not Google and MSN, and Yahoo understands clearly how being apolitical is necessary to really become a hub for finding and accessing data online.
Don't be surprised if in a few more years of broadband development, that Yahoo is able to position itself as an alternative to many cable TV providers. Expect them to start providing premium content alone or in conjunction with Apple. If that happens, Google is actually going to be screwed because the market for that sort of media is huge and the amount of money that Yahoo will have will dwarf Google. Sooner rather than later, Google's stock price will crash down to maybe $20-$30 a share unless they really do some death-defyingly radical things every so often over the next several years that the market likes. In fact, I'd wager that if Yahoo can get deep into providing on-demand TV services, that in five years they'll be able to buy Google in cash unless Google really does become the "Microsoft of search services."
Google does this, they censor right wing sites trying to buy or run ads and have even been caught allowing Hamas to do recruitment on their arabic language site. Google seems to be morphing more into an "evil" company than a good one.
They've got the Black Hat fiasco, this and getting caught actively helping the Chinese police and not giving a flying fuck about it. Is anyone else thinking that Cisco needs to actually do a little bit of institutional introspection and admit the obvious source of their woes: their own damn psychopathic behavior?
I think any website that actively exorts its readers to commit sectarian violence against everyone dissimilar to them and provides some sort of way of organizing groups for that purpose is a pretty good target of our security forces.
Of course now some multicultralists are going to try and say that mainline Christianity and Judaism are just as bad as Islam because of things that happened several hundred years ago and that were sponsored by secular governments. To such people, I challenge them to read this and say that Islamist websites are not a very dangerous threat to our societies.
The slipper slope here is not in shutting down Islamist websites, but in allowing Islamists to freely operate. Wahabis in particular will mass murder even Shiites and Sufis in particular. There is a state interest, even in the US, of eradicating Wahabi Islam because even (Church of) Satanism is a better religion in practice than Wahabi Islam for society.
I pretty much have nothing to do with Amazon anymore. You want to protest this sort of thing? Go buy some books from another online retailer. Before you do, check to see if your Visa can be registered with visaextras.com. Buying from B&N through visaextras.com gets you a 20 bonus points/dollar spent at B&N, and if you buy a typical load of college text books, you'll be able to get a free gift card for NOT shopping at Amazon :)
(I don't get anything out of advertising visaextras, I just want to give people an incentive to protest Amazon)
All it takes is a few dedicated free loaders to make it not worth it for most coffee shops. Starbucks, Panera, our local chain called the Daily Grind and others don't mind people coming in and sitting down for a few hours if they buy at least something modest there, but the people you have to worry about are the cheapskates that buy nothing and still mooch off the wifi.
I would have no problem paying $1-$2 for a few hours of access on top of buying an espresso drink, and I can't really say that our local Starbucks' (yeah we have only 1, inside a B&N store) policy of charging $4 for 2 hours of access is unreasonable. The service is good, AFAIK unrestricted and pretty fast. Panera's is free, but it is slow as hell around here and it's filtered to an unacceptable degree. I couldn't even post blog updates because apparently my blog got listed as a porn site by their filter vendor. I know their reasons, and don't fault them, but for-pay wifi IMO is the way to go.
I see free loaders at our Starbucks all the time because I see other college students going there to study and not buying anything. They go there just because they like the atmosphere, but guess what people? Starbucks needs to make money in order to provide you with that. The least you can do is drop them a few bucks here that there. Don't give me that poor college student routine either. Most of the college students out there can afford $3 for a drink here and there. My family is now probably no more than half, probably closer to 1/3 or 1/4 as rich as most of the families that send their kids to our college. I have to work during the summer and year to pay for my expenses and even I can afford to pay my way when I go to Starbucks. Sell off that new Chevy Suburban or BMW that mumsy and daddykins bought you, if that's what it takes.
It's the same problem with file sharing. Most of the people I knew that were into it hardcore were people from richer families where they had the income to buy the music and movies. Ironically, it's usually the working class students and middle rung middle class students like myself and some others I know that actually pay consistently for such things. In fact, the people with the largest bootleg IP collections I've seen at college, tend to drive very expensive cars and have great apartments that they couldn't possibly pay for on their own without a lot of assitance from their parents.
Pass a law that nullifies software and business method patents.
My university, which is one of the largest in Virginia, has already prominently placed Firefox or Mozilla on virtually all of its lab machines. We also have a general user lab that runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4. More and more students are being conditioned to think "IE=bad for me" because if you live on campus or in an apt that uses the school network, then if you use an unpatched OS or browser, you can come back home if there's a major worm problem and find your access cut off until you upgrade. Firefox is the easiest way to get around that.
After seeing him point out that the government came to regard hackers as such a major threat, I couldn't help but think that our government brings on most of its own problems. The hiring and firing practices and I suppose the procurement processes are also completely fucked up and need to be modernized.
Our government will put people getting $50-$60K into a jet that costs $2B to build and that can carry very large nuclear payloads. They nearly crippled our navy's ability to wage war on other naval power through the SmartShip program, all because they wanted to save on the cost of a sysadmin's salary.
I'm a libertarian by persuasion and I want the government buying the very best and being competitive in its core competencies. I want them to hire the best and brightest, and pay them accordingly because it's cheaper to pay someone an above fair market wage to get the best talent than to have someone do billions of damage to your country's networks. Saving money should be secondary to the government getting everything it needs to carry out its core missions.
Someone who brings a tremendous wealth of networking experience should be elligible for a six digit salary starting out, just as they would in the private sector. I have no problem paying someone who's extremely good at computer security several hundred thousand dollars to do federal network security because as I said, it's cheaper to pay for good people who'll get the job done right.
We also need fewer regulations that protect job security. People who don't do jack shit for the public should be kicked to the curb even faster than they would in the private sector.
they would actually treat their customers like their legitimate users unless they give them reason to believe otherwise. Here would be a good idea for Microsoft: allow unlimited product activations if you buy a site license for your house and send them a registration notice in the mail. Then product activation is against others who might steal your serial number.
I have enough PCs that I'd pay $300 for a "home site license." Microsoft could create such a thing without any hassle because for many households, it'd be worth it. All they'd have to do is make you send a copy of your driver's license or something in the mail and then if someone tries using your serial number that doesn't share the data on your driver's license, they go after them for infringement. That way, product activation doesn't harass law-abiding users.
I'd love to use Longhorn because it looks like a good release, but damned if I'm going to buy it and get 2 "harassment-free" installs. If I buy it, you can bet that I'll only buy it after I've either gotten a cracked CD or found a site license serial that actually works like the ones that XP uses. Every windows license I have is valid, though I use cracked CDs just to get around the PA. Seesh, why am I forced to behave like a common criminal? I can't wait to be able to switch back to OS X at this rate...
IE has some advantages for businesses that have already standardized on using Windows, but for companies that aren't diehard supporters, why bother? The "debugger in IE," if you can even call it a debugger at all, is horrible as is the browser in general these days.
.NET development when you have free access to Visual Studio.
Any sane company that doesn't need the IE-specific features would be insane to not build on Mozilla with its excellent debugging tools and then test with standards-compliant browsers like Opera and then test with IE. IMO, build on IE first instead of using Firefox or Mozilla is akin to using Notepad and nAnt for Windows
When done right, sports and martial arts hone the violent instincts in young men and women to be disciplined and under control. Aggressiveness is actually a good thing when it is controlled by other impulses. Afterall, how many women out there would feel safe with a man whose first reaction is to just "talk it over" when he sees another man really accosting his girlfriend or wife?
I completely support the right of Rockstar to produce games like GTA, but I believe that ones like GTA are not cathartic. I despise the PTC even more than most here because of their rhetoric which clashes with a Biblical notion of parental responsibility, but I have to grudgingly agree that GTA is not good for many younger players. It's not like Quake or Unreal Tournament where you're shooting really fake-looking people to death, but you're graphically beating to death a guy who's similar to the hobo you might encounter walking down town. Most violent games are safe and cathartic because either the violence is for a "noble cause" or it's just mindless mayhem. GTA is very violent, very straight to the point about targetting certain groups, kinda realistically actually, that do exist in society and that many people might encounter on a daily basis.
As always, the real people to blame are the distributors like Wal-Mart. Rockstar deserves its FTC investigation for fraud, but let's not forget the fact that it was Wal-Mart, Target, etc. that put those copies of GTA in junior's hand in the first place. Rockstar, as bad as they may be, can't enforce that because they're just the company the makes the game.
I've said for a while that what we need is a return in this country to a real gun culture. We need the average kid to grow up in a Swiss-style family where the parents train them how to use it, and instill respect for weapons from an early age. We used to have that here and the violent crime rate was lower because since they were small kids, the general public knew what weapons were and understood the need for discipline. Most violent tendencies can be controlled through discipline. What we have to do is instill good training, respect and rational thought into our kids from an early age. If we did that, then crimes would be rarer, our jocks would be less likely to be anti-social assholes and society in general would be healthier.
Looks like someone had a little bit of competition on the "natural male enhancer" front...
Now that his head has been bashed into 50% its original size, do those penis enlargments work on the "big head?"
I said that if you walked in like you had a right to be there and were caught rifling through their possessions. Meaning they find you just walking around, opening the refrigerator, drinking the milk (analogous to copying peoples' files) and snooping through their stuff. Most people wouldn't consider that an uninvited guest, regardless of countries. A hacker is not the type that says sorry and leaves immediately when they realize their mistake, but deliberately walks in like they had some right to be there.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. If you know you're not supposed to sneak around a company or agency's property, then why do you think it's ok to break into their computers? In most parts of the world, just walking into someone's house and looking around without the owner's permission would get you beaten or killed by the owner. It's common courtesy and most of these "hackers" seem to lack any of it.
As for the "horror" of his extradition, don't blame uncle sam. The British government is big enough to tell our government to piss off if it felt such a thing weren't warranted. The main reason that we don't do such a thing to our citizens is that most countries that would want our people sent over to them wouldn't give them a fair trial, and that's not inherently because they're American. A Chinese is probably no more like to get a fair trial in Mugabe's Zimbabwe than an American. Foreign governments know that if our people attack them, that our law enforcement will arrest them and prosecute them, even if the country is hostile. The feds threatened to arrest the Americans who defaced Chinese websites after the PLA-Air Force brough our AWAC down early in Bush's first term. Few governments, China's especially, would do that to their own people.
Every so often I get some dumbass at my university trying to get me to teach them those "mad skillz" of h@x0ring that apparently all CS majors have. My interest was always in programming, not in things like that. They even have the gall to look at me like I'm the asshole, when I tell them that I've never bothered to learn such things, that I feel that what they want to do is morally wrong and that they should learn to actually respect others' privacy and property. The same people would probably wonder what the hell is wrong with someone who asked them to teach them how to use a jimmy to open up some frat boy's car so they could screw around in his mustang. IMO, there's really no difference.
Given the fact that the TSA just got caught trying to continue TIA, I think that this is the last thing we need. It starts out very innocently. The industry adds something like this and pretty soon we have followup laws that begin to gradually force software to make full use of any sort of identity layer. Anonymity becomes nearly impossible, and for many countries that means that the Internet loses its alleged immunity to censorship.
One of the things that disturbs me about this sort of thing is that extreme rendition can work both ways. The Syrian government might want their back scratched for a change and Uncle Sam then turns over a few names held on US soil using USA PATRIOT Act powers to secret get the information. If our government is willing to ship people to get tortured, what makes anyone think that it's not immoral enough to scratch another, more abusive government's back a little by helping them clamp down on dissent?
Biometric information tied to your credit card would go a very long way toward solving many of these crimes. What we need are open standards for communicating and storing biometrics information. I should be able to look into a webcam with a retina scanner and it should be able to tell Amazon.com that I'm the person who owns the credit card being used. The problem with this system is that it'll end up making something like TIA more realistic because it'll be accompanied by laws that force software developers to make good use of it.
Is that most of the cost that goes into developing it is in the labor. The only problem that companies like Microsoft face is that their shareholders have gotten addicted to the high profit margins that have dominated for so long in the commodity software market. Realistically, Microsoft could afford to cut the cost of Windows from $100 per upgrade disk to $50 a copy and from $200 for the full version to $75-$100 if they wanted to become more aggressive. Office could see similar price reductions, and in fact such a major price reduction might be enough to cause a lot of buyers to just say what the hell and buy the software even if they don't REALLY need to upgrade.
If companies like Microsoft really want to rake in the cash on support and upgrades, they need to make them cheap and exploit economies of scale. It'd be a lot easier to convince many companies to buy a support contract that costs $5-10/machine/month for support and upgrades than make them pay $250 for an upgrade every two years. With that monthly fee, the company gets seemless upgrades and Microsoft gets a guaranteed revenue stream from them.
RSS is convenient for keeping track of news, but you'd think that these companies found a solution for Cold Fusion (nuclear physics, not the app server) with the way they tout it. Come on people, it's a XML stream that's updated with a little bit of programming/scripting magic, not something radical and new.